How-To Guides

MS-DOS And Word For Windows Go Open Source: Finally

MS-DOS and Word for Windows are easily two of Microsoft’s biggest products in the companies history, and is what Microsoft is known for. On their blog on Tuesday, Microsoft announced that MS-DOS and Word for Windows code is finally available to the public for the first time.

The release oft this code to the public, is part of Microsoft’s efforts with the Computer History Museum. The goal is to show the history of computing and Microsoft to the public, and show the roots of personal computing to the masses, as coding and newer generations appreciate programming.

MS-DOS Remember It?

The origins of MS-DOS evolved in 1980, when IBM approached Microsoft’s Bill Gates to work on a program for them. Discussions for one program led to Bill Gates and his team at the time to create an operating system from this project, and that eventually led to MS-DOS, and evolved from 35 percent of Microsoft’s staff working on it.

MS-DOS easily became one of Microsoft’s biggest hits in 1980, and set the mark for what Microsoft was going to be in the future. Now, that the code is open to the public for the first time, current software engineers and historians can look at the early source code and see what exactly took place.

Word For Windows

After the release of MS-DOS, Microsoft then released Word for Windows in 1983, which was destined to be used with a mouse. It was a keyboard driven program during its first few years on the market, but in 1989 it skyrocketed to success, and became more than half of the companies revenue via word-processing.

With the code being under 300kb, Microsoft released this code bundle to the public, and is doing it with pride. With over 200 million Windows 8 licenses and 1 billion people using Microsoft Office, the company is releasing these early snippets to fanfare of programmers and geeks around the world. The full text around the projects is available at the computer history museum website, and if you are a historian, is well worth a read.

MS-DOS and Word for Windows are huge products in the history of Microsoft. Now, they are available for anyone to view and use, code wise.

Written by:Dave Amodt Dave is our news reporter, he reports on everything Microsoft, including MSFT (stock news), related Windows news as well as most hardware news.Dave runs his own content production company and publishes new content every weekday on our site. If you want to stay up to date on everything Microsoft, make sure to subscribe to Dave. He's also on Google+